Collectively Classical: Connectedness, Awe, Feeling Moved, and Motion at a Live and Livestreamed Concert

Abstract

Live concerts normally involve gathering at the same time and place. In livestreamed concerts, participants may gather in time but not in space, providing a natural comparison for studying live concert experiences. Previous research suggests that livestreamed concerts promote more social connectedness than pre-recorded concerts and that live concerts promote more movement than listening to recorded music in a group. However, to the best of our knowledge, a comparison between live and livestreamed concerts has not been conducted. The Danish String Quartet is a critically acclaimed music group who performed a live concert that was also livestreamed. The live and livestreaming audiences’ emotions were measured with surveys that collected data on connectedness, feeling moved, and awe after each piece. In addition, audience motion was measured with an application that recorded from the participants' own smartphones’ accelerometers. Survey responses were collected from 91 live and 32 livestreaming participants. Motion data was collected from 82 live and 25 livestreaming participants. While the live audience felt more connected to other audience members than the livestreaming audience, both live and livestreaming audiences felt similarly connected to the performers. Feeling moved and awe were influenced by the piece of music, but not by the audience condition (i.e., live or livestreaming audience). During the classical Beethoven and Schnittke pieces, the live audience moved less, while during the folk tunes, the live audience moved more. The differences between pieces were smaller in the livestreaming audience. The live audience reported more connectedness to the audience when their neighbors moved more during the folk and less during the Beethoven and Schnittke. Connectedness with other audience members was also related to the amount that an individual stilled in response to key musical moments in the pieces. Together, these findings show that the classical concert audience actively engages with the music and the associated socioemotional experience based on genre-specific norms and expectations.